This is one of the presentations used for the StoM project final review (http://www.stom-project.eu/). It aims at presenting the state of the art for Web Annotation and how the evolutions in this area that happened in the last two years have been taken into account to improve Net7's Semantic Annotation System Pundit (http://thepund.it/).

1. Presentation of Context:
Web Annotations (& Pundit)
during the StoM Project (May 2014 – Apr. 2016)
Luca De Santis – Net7 Srl
StoM Final Review – Bruxelles, June 21st 2016

2. Why this presentation
• Presenting the most relevant events happened in the two years of
the project regarding web annotation
– (and why Pundit has become a relevant technology in this Arena…)

3. Annotations? What are we talking about?
• Def. “Annotation, or tagging, is about attaching names, attributes,
comments, descriptions, etc. to a document or to a selected part in a
text.”
• My favourite definition when explaining Pundit: “Marginalia on digital
documents”

4. Does it make sense(to talk about annotations on the web)?
#1
Watch an excerpt from W3C TPAC Conference, Santa Clara, CA Oct 28-31, 2014
To see this part: http://bit.ly/291k8NG – for the whole video: https://youtu.be/m2cJNDs7y2Y

5. Does it make sense (to talk about annotations on the web)?
#2
Watch “Perspectives on Annotating Scholarship” – Hypothes.is, published Dec 1st 2015
To see this part: http://bit.ly/28UKTWT – for the whole video: https://youtu.be/_XBBWD1OjPw

6. Yes it makes sense!
• Why? See the video excerpts shown before!
– Growing need to provide tools to contextualise user generated content,
beyond simple “conky” comments
– To provide powerful tools for students, researchers, professionals (but
also for general users…)
– It might be a killer app for certain domains (e.g Scholarship)
• How should it be done?
– Standard-based
– Open interoperable systems
– Avoiding locked-in, closed systems from commercial vendors
• Who did in the last months work in this “Arena”?
– Evolutions in the Market
– W3C
– New Alliances

7. What has happened during StoM: the
market
• Who is annotating the web?
• Note managing platforms
– Evernote
– Microsoft OneNote
• Pure annotation platforms
– Hypothes.is
– Genius

8. What has happened during StoM: the
market
• Who is annotating the web?
• Note managing platforms
– Evernote
– Microsoft OneNote
• Pure annotation platforms
– Hypothes.is
– Genius
• How are they doing?
– Quite good!

9. What has happened during StoM: the
market
• Who is annotating the web?
• Note managing platforms
– Evernote
– Microsoft OneNote
• Pure annotation platforms
– Hypothes.is
– Genius
• How are they doing?
– Quite good!
It reached 100 million
users worldwide in
2014. Now probably
they are around 150
million!

10. What has happened during StoM: the
market
• Who is annotating the web?
• Note managing platforms
– Evernote
– Microsoft OneNote
• Pure annotation platforms
– Hypothes.is
– Genius
• How are they doing?
– Quite good!
OneNote has been integrated in the Microsoft
Edge browser, allowing users to create
annotations on any web page (basically
drawings over a screenshot)

11. What has happened during StoM: the
market
• Who is annotating the web?
• Note managing platforms
– Evernote
– Microsoft OneNote
• Pure annotation platforms
– Hypothes.is
– Genius
• How are they doing?
– Quite good!
It received multiple investments. Amongst its
backers there are also big names like the
Shuttleworth Foundation

12. What has happened during StoM: the
market
• Who is annotating the web?
• Note managing platforms
– Evernote
– Microsoft OneNote
• Pure annotation platforms
– Hypothes.is
– Genius
• How are they doing?
– Quite good!
Multiple rounds of VC
investments!

13. What has happened during StoM: the
market
• Who is annotating the web?
• Note managing platforms
– Evernote
– Microsoft OneNote
• Pure annotation platforms
– Hypothes.is
– Genius
• How are they doing?
– Quite good!
I said multiple!
(In total they raised
around 97,7 million $
in VC funding!)

14. What has happened during StoM: the
market
• Who is annotating the web?
• Note managing platforms
– Evernote
– Microsoft OneNote
• Pure annotation platforms
– Hypothes.is
– Genius
• How are they doing?
– Quite good!
• None of them supports a
semantic data model!

15. What has happened during StoM: W3C
• The “Web Annotation Working Group” was born
– Launched on July 15th 2014
– https://www.w3.org/annotation/
• Working on the Web Annotation standard
• Web Annotation Data Model
– Evolution from the previous Open Annotation “draft”
– First working draft December 11th 2014 – Latest update March 31st 2016
(still a draft!)
• Pundit supports the W3C Web Annotation Data Model!

16. W3C Web Annotation: the vision
https://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation-architecture.svg

17. What has happened during StoM: AAK
• Annotating All Knowledge Coalition
– https://hypothes.is/annotating-all-knowledge/
• Founded by Hypothes.is in 2015
• Goal: “to create an open, interoperable
annotation layer over web content”.
• Who: scholarly publishers, platforms,
libraries, and technology organizations

18. What has happened during StoM: AAK
• Annotating All Knowledge Coalition
– https://hypothes.is/annotating-all-knowledge/
• Founded by Hypothes.is in 2015
• Goal: “to create an open, interoperable
annotation layer over web content”.
• Who: scholarly publishers, platforms,
libraries, and technology organizations
• Pundit Joined in June 2016

19. iAnnotate 2016
• Held in Berlin on May 19th-20th
• First time in Europe
• Supported by Hypothes.is, W3C
Germany/Austria, DFKI, Deutsche
Telekom, SpringerNature,
Microsoft
• Focus on Annotation Technologies,
& Use Cases

20. iAnnotate 2016
• Net7 presented Pundit at the
conference!
– See the video at
https://t.co/mrXyTSSv4W
• Held in Berlin on May 19th-20th
• First time in Europe
• Supported by Hypothes.is, W3C
Germany/Austria, DFKI, Deutsche
Telekom, SpringerNature,
Microsoft
• Focus on Annotation Technologies,
& Use Cases

21. Conclusion
• Many events happened in the last two years in the world of Web
Annotation and Pundit kept the pace!
• Pundit provides now (June 2016) one of the most (the most?)
compliant W3C Web Annotation Data Model implementation
• Pundit provides a semantic data model, a distinguished value
respect its main competitors
• Pundit main codebase (both for the client and for the annotation
server) is open source
• Start annotating the web now with Pundit!
http://thepund.it

22. Thanks for your attention
http://www.stom-project.eu/
http://www.netseven.it/
@lucadex
http://www.lucadex.it
https://it.linkedin.com/in/lucadex